Retirement Planning Can Be Simple…

…but it’s not easy. It’s not easy because there can be a lot of anxiety when you consider all the different moving parts that should be considered before you stop receiving regular paychecks. There’s an innate fear of the unknown and the future is full of unknowns. As wealth managers, we hear these concerns around retirement quite often:

Many fear they might outlive their savings

Many worry about market volatility and how inflation may eat away at the spending power of Social Security and pension income

Many baby boomers don’t feel confident that they will have enough money for medical expenses and know that they may require expensive long-term care assistance

As I look to help my clients manage this “retirement environment,” I’d say these concerns are understandable.

People are living longer, so a long and healthy retirement is in itself a risk to running out of money

Significantly fewer people are retiring with a pension.

Interest rates remain historically low, affecting the way people generate income in retirement.

And the stock market has been volatile again this year,

Perhaps you share these concerns as well. If so, I’m very glad you’re going to engage in this series where we will begin to discuss our planning process that attempts to address these concerns. Planning for retirement is exactly what we do at the Haas Financial Group. And while it’s not easy, we hope to make it a bit simpler by sharing our six-step process. In this series we will talk about how we suggest breaking retirement planning down into six separate components, that when aligned together, can bring greater confidence to your approach to retirement.

It will begin with a conversation on what retirement means to you. It’s important to first have a vision for how you will spend your 168 hours/week if work isn’t occupying 40, 50, 60 of them. As we discuss our process, keep YOUR answers to these questions front of mind.

Second, we consider your time horizon. Will you completely retire at some point? Or will you instead phase out? Your age often dictates when you’ll have “access” to certain income.

Third, let’s discuss your retirement income needs, wants and wishes. Differentiating between this these is critical to structuring income resources and savings to match these different categories of spending.

Fourth, do some retirement planning. There’s no room for online calculators or napkin math when trying to figure out how much money you should have set aside before calling it quits. A lot of assumptions need to be made. We’ll talk about making conservative assumptions and building in an uncertainty bucket for unexpected emergencies or opportunities.

Fifth, let’s figure out how much you need to save to meet your target.

Sixth, let’s talk about investment risk and return. There’s no magic formula to investing. In fact, we suggest allocating assets into different “buckets” with different objectives over different periods of time to make the retirement plan work.

Tune in over the next couple weeks as we break down each part of the process to try to make retirement planning a little easier to digest.

Securities offered through LPL Financial, Member FINRA and SIPC. Investment advice offered through U.S. Financial Advisors, a registered investment advisor. U.S. Financial Advisors and Haas Financial Group are separate entities from LPL Financial.